Major American Artist Resurfaces in Kansas City Exhibit Illuminates Albert Bloch's Significant Contribution to 20th-Century Art

Article excerpt

In the world of art, the spotlight of rediscovery sometimes
shines in the unlikeliest places.

Take the case of Albert Bloch. The Missouri-born artist of
German descent was, for a period of about eight years near the turn
of the century, at the forefront of the development of modern art
in Germany, exhibiting his paintings alongside such luminaries as
Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Paul Klee, and Pablo Picasso. Arthur
Jerome Eddy, one of the foremost collectors of early modern art,
considered Bloch the major American artist working in Europe at the
time. Yet, today he is virtually unknown.

An exhibition at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City,
Mo., attempts to bring Albert Bloch out from obscurity and make
better known his contribution to modern art. Entitled "Albert
Bloch: the American Blue Rider," the show consists of about 80
paintings and works on paper, spanning the artist's career from his
early days as an illustrator in St. Louis, to his later paintings,
executed in his attic studio in Lawrence, Kan., where he lived for
the last four decades of his life.
"We're accustomed to thinking that all the major American
artists are known at this point," says Henry Adams, co-curator of
the exhibition, who thinks this is a rare example of a major artist
resurfacing. "We haven't had a chance to look at Bloch's work as a
whole. This is really the first truly serious show of his work. I
think that Bloch ranks with just about any of the major American
modernists."
If Albert Bloch has any name recognition, it has come through
his membership in Der Blaue Reiter (the Blue Rider), an
international group of artists working in Munich between 1911 and
1914. Bloch had moved to Munich in 1909 after four successful years
producing caricatures, political cartoons, and cover illustrations
- and occasional reviews and stories - for the Mirror, an
adventurous weekly magazine that published ground-breaking work by
controversial American authors. The Blue Rider was formed by
Kandinsky and Marc, leaders of the German avant-garde. The group,
of whom Bloch was the only American, produced two exhibitions and
books, which shaped seminal aspects of 20th-century art.
Though short-lived, the Blue Rider was an extraordinarily
influential group, "the most important artists association in
Germany at the beginning of the century," according to Annegret
Hoberg, curator at the Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich
and co-curator of the Nelson-Atkins exhibition.
The first Blue Rider show, in 1911, was a landmark, one of the
two or three most important exhibitions in this century. It was the
first international exhibit of modern art outside of France and the
first to include Russian, American, French, and German artists. The
bold outlines, non-naturalistic colors, and simplified forms of the
Blue Rider paintings were radical forms of expression at a time
when academic painting was the norm, and the show received harsh
criticism initially. …